Chapter XIV: Guests at the Lighthouse

In a month Dave Fletcher was established at the light on Black Rocks as assistant-keeper--a position that would bring him a far handsomer salary than could any present clerkship at Shipton. This berth was not secured without a struggle by Dave's friends, as several candidates were willing to take the duties and profits of the place.

"You've got the place, though others wanted it," said the keeper, returning from town one day and wiping his round, red face with his handkerchief. "News came to-day. I don't know but you would have lost it, but they say a friend of yours interceded and told them up and down you must have it any way."

"Who was it?"

"Somebody that said he had seen you run a saw and knew you could run a lighthouse. That's what folks tell me he said."

"Oh, Squire Sylvester!"

"Yes. Queer feller; but he isn't all growl, though he does look like it, maybe."

Some time after this there were visitors at the light. One was expected, the other was not. The first was Bart Trafton, brought by the light-keeper one soft, sunny April day. Bart was very much interested in the lantern.

"Can I go up with you and see the lantern?" he asked.

"Oh yes," said Dave, leading Bart up the iron stairway that mounted from room to room.

"There!" said Bart, looking round on the glass windows enclosing the lantern and the lamp in its centre: "I think this is a dreadful interestin' place."

"I think so too, Bart."

"And what I think is interestin' is that lamp in the centre. Why, granny uses a lamp that, it seems to me, is no bigger than that, but it can't throw anywhere near such a light as that. I saw your light last night."

"You did? where?"

"From the hill behind our house. I went up there and saw it."

"I did not know that. Then we could signal to one another."

"Signal?"

"Yes, this way. Supposing, now, I should hang a lantern out on the side of the lighthouse toward the land, toward your home, and you could see it: you might take it as a sign that I wanted--well--we will say--a doctor."

"I think I could see it with father's spy-glass; it is real powerful. Say, will you try it to-morrow night? You hang it out, and I will take father's spy-glass and see if I can make out anything. Then I will send you word by the mail. You don't think it is too far from our house to the light?"

"Too far to see? oh no. Now, I said a man might want a doctor here. I have often thought if one of us was sick--and you know the keeper is getting old--and if the other couldn't get off to bring a doctor, it might be a very serious thing for the sick man."

"Well, if you are in trouble and will hang out a light, and I see it, I will tell the people, and they will get to you."

Dave thought no more of this, but silently said, "I wonder if I haven't something else interesting to show the boy! Yes, I have got it."

He went down from the lantern to the kitchen, and took from its shelf the strange box of sandal-wood, whose story Dave already knew.

The light-keeper now repeated to Bart the tale of the drifting relic. He held it to his ear. Did the boy think it was a shell--that it would murmur a song of wave and cloud and the broad sunshine sweeping down on lonely surf-washed ledges?

"It won't talk," said the light-keeper, beaming on him.

Bart shook his head.

"I wish it would talk," thought the keeper. "It might tell about that man whom we picked up and brought into the light, and who seemed to know something about it. I wonder if he will ever call for it!"

He spoke of it to Dave afterward. The two were up on the lantern-deck at sunset looking off upon the sea. The water was still and glassy. It was heaving gently, as if with the dying day it too was dying, but feebly pulsating with life. One vast surface of shining gray, it gradually darkened till it was a mass of shadows across which were drawn the lines of white surf cresting the ledges.

"Several vessels in the harbour," said Dave.

"Yes: they have been coming down from Shipton this afternoon; but the wind has all died away, and they seem to have made up their mind to anchor there to-night. It is getting cool. Perhaps we had better go down," said the keeper, shrugging his shoulders. While within the lantern he glanced at the lamp, and then descended to the kitchen. Without the twilight deepened. Out of the gloom towered the lighthouse, bearing aloft its guiding, warning rays. The keeper was in the kitchen, trimming an old lantern which had done him much faithful service. That small visitor, Bart, had gone with Dave up into the lantern, anxious to see the working of the lamp.

The keeper lighted his lantern, and then started for the fog-signal tower. He was descending the stairs, when he heard a cry outside of the lighthouse.

"Somebody at the foot of the ladder, I guess, wants me," concluded the keeper, "and I will go to the door and see who it is."

He went to the door, lantern in hand, and looked down.

"Hollo, there!" sang out a man from the shadows below. "Shall I come up?"

"Ay, ay!" responded the keeper. "Low water down there, isn't it, so you can come up the ladder?"

"I guess so. I will make fast and try the ladder."

The keeper heard the steps of somebody on the ladder, and then a man's form wriggled up through the hole in the platform outside the door.

"I get up with less trouble to you than I did the last time I was here," said the man.

The keeper looked at him.

"Ho! this you?" he asked.

"Nobody else."

It was the man who one day, when intoxicated, had been rescued from the bar, and the next morning had shown singular interest in the little box of sandalwood.

"Come up!" said the keeper, leading the man to the kitchen.

"I have been some time coming, haven't I?"

"Better late than never. Always glad to see people. Take that chair before the fire, and make yourself at home. I did not know as I should ever see you again. You are a Shipton man?" asked the keeper bluntly.

"Yes, I belong to Shipton; but then I am off about all the time. I think I have seen you on the street there."

"I was thinking myself I had seen you, but I couldn't say when, except that time you were at the lighthouse."

"Have you got that box now?"

"Oh yes. Here it is. Nobody has come to claim it."

He took the box down from its shelf and placed it on the table.

The keeper's companion said, "Now I will tell you the story about that box, and this letter, too, will confirm it."

As he spoke he took a letter from his pocket and opened it.

"The man who wrote that was an old shipmate, Grant Williams, a warm friend, and faithful too. He knew I had a weakness, and used to say he was afraid his shipmate would get into the breakers. He sent me a letter from a foreign port; here it is. You look at it. You will see that he gave me some good advice. He laid it all down like a chart; but I was a poor hand to steer by it. 'I expect to sail for Shipton in a Norwegian bark,' he wrote (I think he was born in Norway himself, but had been a long time in America), 'and I am going to get and bring my old shipmate a present of a box of sandal-wood, and I shall pack a few keepsakes into it. I will put my picture in, just to make it seem all the more like a present from me. I will put your initials and mine on the under side of the box. I will leave it at Shipton with your father if you are not there. And now don't forget this: it is to be a reminder of my desire that you should let liquor alone. When you see it, think of an old shipmate, and look at my face you will find in the box.' The first time I saw the box was that morning after the night you found me in a state that was no credit to the one found. I knew the ship had been wrecked, and only that, and when I saw the face of my old shipmate, and knew that he had been lost on the bar where I came pretty near losing my own life through what he warned me against, I--I--felt it. I didn't see how I could take the box until I was in a condition to give some promise, you know, that I would be a better man; and now I hope I am, God being my helper."

"Well, I think it is plain proof that you are the one whom the man Williams meant, and the owner of this box, if those are your initials on the bottom--if--"

The keeper was about to ask the man for his name, but the sound of a light step tripping downstairs arrested their conversation, and both turned toward the stairway.

It was Bart Trafton. He looked up, stopped, started forward, and exclaimed, "Why, father!"

"This you, Bart?" said Thomas Trafton. "How came you here?--My boy, Mr. Tolman. My vessel is off there in the stream, and while waiting for the wind I just rowed over."

There they stood, side by side, Bart and his father, while the keeper was rising to hand the box to Thomas Trafton. The lighthouse kitchen never presented a more interesting scene than that of the reformed sailor in the presence of his oft-abused child, taking into his hands this gift, that had survived a wrecking storm, to be not only a pledge of the friendship of the dead, but to the living a stimulus to right-doing and a warning against wrong.

Thomas Trafton rowed back to the vessel that night. Bart was carried to town the next day. Bart reached home at sundown, and first told granny about the affair of the box as far as he had been able to pick up the threads of the details and weave them into a story; then he asked, "Where is father's spy-glass?"

"Behind the clock, Bartie," said granny. "What do you want it for?"

"Just to look off," he said, seizing the glass and bearing it out-doors. Granny followed him into the yard and there halted; for Bart was going farther, already bestriding the fence.

"Where is that boy going?" wondered granny.

"Bartie!" she called aloud, "it is a-gittin' too late to see things clear."

He was now mounting a hill beyond the yard.

"Back in a moment, granny!" he shouted.

She soon saw his figure standing out, clear and distinct, against the western sky, and he was elevating the glass.

"Too soon to see anything yet," he said, when he returned.

"Where you lookin', child?"

"Off to the lighthouse."

"They haven't more than lighted her up."

"I know it. I was too early."

"You want to see the light? You won't have to take a glass for that; you just wait."

"I want to see something else. You come with me, granny, when I go again."

"Sakes, child, what you up to?"

Later two figures crept up the hill, one carrying a spy-glass.

"There, granny!" said the bearer of the glass. "Now you look off to the light at Black Rocks, and right under it see if you can't see another light--a little one."

"La, child," declared granny, vainly looking through the glass, "I can't see nothin'. This thing pokes out what there is there."

"Eh? can't you, granny?" replied Bart, levelling the glass toward the harbour. "I see the light. And--and--I think--I see a--something else underneath. Seems like a little star under a moon."

The next day this was dropped in the post-office:--

"DEAR DAVE,--I saw your lantern, I know. Did you hang it out? Your friend, BART."

Dave answered this in person within a week.

"I'm having a holiday," he said to granny--"off for a day--and thought I would call. I want you, please, to say for me to Bart I got his note, and that I did hang out my lantern the night that he looked for it."

"Now, did you ever see sich a boy? He has been up every night to look for that lantern, and he says he feels easier if he don't see it."

"You tell him not to worry. We are very comfortable. A person might live there a century and nothing happen to them."

Notwithstanding this assertion about the safety of century-serving keepers, Bart would sometimes steal out in the dark and climb the bare, lonely hill. Then he would search the black horizon.

"There's the reg'lar light," he would say, "but I don't see anything more. All right!"